Significant

Monday, February 06, 2017

China’s Solar PV Capacity Doubled in 2016

China’s installed capacity of solar PV doubled in 2016, according to a National Energy Administration report out on Saturday.The country now boasts over 77 gigawatts of installed solar PV, up from 34 at the end of 2015.According to Reuters the provinces that saw the fastest growth were Shandong, Xinjiang, and Henan, with Xinjiang, Gansu, Qinghai, and Inner Mongolia enjoying highest power capacity.New climate science war?Amid fears leading US science institutions may be defunded under Donald Trump’s presidency comes a report claiming global warming figures were exaggerated.Daily Mail on Sunday reporter David Rose said he had uncovered “astonishing evidence” that data had been manipulated ahead of the 2015 Paris climate conference.“World leaders were duped into investing billions over manipulated global warming data,” he wrote – pointing the finger at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).The truth may be less exciting. According to Carbon Brief, a website specialising in fact-checking, the NOAA figures have been verified by a number of other agencies.Rose’s claim that NOAA’s results “can never be verified” is patently incorrect, writes Zeke Hausfather, an analyst at Berkeley Earth, an independent temperature analysis project.“What he fails to mention is that the new NOAA results have been validated by independent data from satellites, buoys, and Argo floats and that many other independent groups, including Berkeley Earth and the UK’s Met Office Hadley Centre, get effectively the same results,” he adds.The Daily Mail article was corrected midway through Sunday, tweeted Rose, to remedy a “previous inadvertent omission that NOAA and Hadcrut [another data set] use different baselines.”Read more at China’s Solar PV Capacity Doubled in 2016